The first is by Craige McMillan and this appeared in World Net Daily. Among other things, he pointed out that the United Nations, whom the Pope was addressing, have been known to skim taxpayer funds for themselves instead of disbursing it to the poor. That was the crime of Zacchaeus and most of the Roman tax collectors. They really were crooks. Zacchaeus was announcing his repentance via a vow to make the reparation dictated by Old Testament law. He echoed also the reply I left for "Papa Alex": that God requires private, personal charity from each of us. We cannot designate any government to act as a surrogate on our behalf in the discharge of charitable duties. It will not satisfy God's laws. Moreover, when has government ever done anything of that sort effectively?
Father John Zuhlsdorf also weighed in; here's his thorough, line-by-line analysis of the papal address in question. He asks his own questions. I'll echo a few of them here.
- Do we all recall that a UN agency recently suggested that the Church was guilty of torture for promulgating its teaching against abortion? (That occurred to me, too, as I was reading it.) Why is the Pope appealing to the UN for anything?
- The Pope, hailing from Argentina, comes from a country whose economy has been spiraling downward. Why should we listen to anyone from Argentina regarding economic matters?
- Finally, "How about talking about something other than what has been shown time and again to be a disaster?"
Finally, let me point out that the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen often linked the traitor Judas Iscariot with the "social justice" philosophy, going so far as to call Judas "the patron saint of social justice". Here is a brief piece he wrote.
The pope was in Argentina during the last economic collapse. Unless he thinks we should all live like that I'm going to hope he just doesn't know what he's talking about.
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